A Sport and a Pastime

L’Aigle Noir
Le Pyramide	Quatre Saisons
Coco	Moderne

and the bottom is missing, like a letter torn apart on the wet street.

It is in Nancy, in the hotel on the square. A bright December afternoon. In the center of everything, the statue of Stanislas, traces of old snow at his feet, his green arm pointing to the barren park. They are ushered into the silence of a room on the side. She is happy. It is the weekend. They have wandered along the street in the great, plain-faced crowd, and she has seen a leather suit that costs 130 francs which she imagines he may buy for her. She was wearing a black fur hat. Every eye followed when she walked.

The radio is playing. They undress in the winter daylight. Dean is a little embarrassed at his condition. His prick gets hard whenever he looks at her. He can’t help it. His chief desire is to raise her on it, exultant, to run her up into the sunshine, into the starlight where she can see the world. They begin to dance a little, naked, in the early darkness, the music thin and foreign, their feet bare on the rug. Then they make love, she astride him, in the favorite manner of the Roman poets, as he informs her. He lies gazing up at her, his hands encircling her ankles. The rich smell of her falls over him. At the bottom of it all, his eyes lingering there, the mute triangle in which he is implanted.

“Do you think you will remember me in five years?” she asks him at dinner.

He tries to smile, but it’s dry. He is empty, with no desire to talk about love.

“You will go,” she says. “You are the type.”

“No.”

“Si,” she insists calmly.

By now they know something of each other. There is a fund they can draw on together. The encounter begins to have an essence of its own which neither can define but which nourishes them both, and happily, in the single unselfish ritual of love, they contribute to it all they can. Nor does it matter how much either takes away. It is a limitless body. It can never be exhausted but only, although one never believes this, forgot.

They are served a dish piled high with ecrevisses, salty, pale. The tiny legs crack like dry wood under their teeth. The hidden juices spurt. She wants to know what they are called. Dean isn’t sure. Crayfish, he says.

“Crayfish?”

“I think so,” he says.

She invents a story: The Prince of Crayfish. Dean listens, licking his fingers while she unfolds, as if to a child, a tale filled with mysteries.

Deep down, where it is only darkness, the prince of crayfish was born. It was very difficult. It took a long time because his feet kept getting tangled up with his mother’s, but finally he was swimming, a little weakly, by her side. From all over the sea important fish came to bring him presents: necklaces of coral, little monies to eat, seaweed to lie on, green and black…

He is watching her mouth, her clever eyes. Her teeth are a bad color and not well cared for. One can see that when she smiles, but he is only watching the phrases, he hardly notices.

When he was six months old, he said to his mother: I am going up to see the world. Ah, she was very sad. She cried. She didn’t want, but then she said: God be with you, my dear son. Be brave and honest and no hurt will…

“Befall you,” Dean supplies, as if in a dream.

“Befall you,” she says, the word funny in her mouth. “No hurt will befall you.”

“Go on,” he says.

“Do you like it?”

“Oh, yes.”

From waters so deep he had to swim for three days before it even began to grow light, he makes his way to the surface …

An odyssey which ends—Dean is shocked—in disaster, in a great, frothing kettle where the prince is scalded to death, still brave, still honest… She shrugs over the soup at the abruptness of it all. Dean sits silent. He is drained of all invention and also aware, for the first time, that she is fully able to speak, to create images strong enough to alter his life.

They return to the hotel at ten. The corridors are empty. Shoes are set outside each room. The catch of the door makes a little click as it closes and with that sound, Dean suddenly awakes. He turns the bolt. They are safe. The city is his. No one in it is more powerful. Hushed in sleep it lies, white specks of frost on its windows, steeped in the cold. No one is more blessed, more demonic.

In the bathroom she stands naked before the thin mirror. Dean appears behind her. His hands, all reverence at first, like those of men reprieved, move to possess her. Tenderly he weighs her breasts.

“I would look very well in that suit,” she reflects.

With no resonance, he says, “Oui.”

“This one grew first,” she says.

“Is that true?” Dean says inanely.

“He was always bigger. Oui.”

He becomes attentive to the smaller.

“Poor baby,” he murmurs.

Above the basin on a glass shelf: her bottles. Biodop, one of them reads. Her stockings lie crumpled on the floor. Over the radio: Nights of Spain. The suit, he remembers, had a belt which was a gleaming, leather thong.

They have turned off the light. In the room there is a huge armoire, a wicker basket, chairs. A metal tree on which garments can be hung. The ceiling is very high. In its center—one’s eyes must become accustomed to the dark—a grotesque fixture. The hours pass. She is pinioned on the bed, her arms trapped beneath her, her legs forced wide. Her eyes are closed. The radio is playing Sucu Sucu. The world has stopped. Oceans still as photographs. Galaxies floating down. Her cunt tastes sweet as fruit.

Morning. She lies face down, warm still from sleep. Her arms are up on either side of her head, the elbows bent. Dean is on top of her, encircling, in the early light, and they are fucking like weight lifters. He pauses at last. He leans over to admire her, she does not see him. Hair covers her cheek. Her skin seems very white. He kisses her side and then, without force, as one stirs a favorite mare, begins again. She comes to life with a soft, exhausted sound, like someone saved from drowning.

Her narrow, cool back commanding the breakfast. The waiter who brings it does not even glance towards the bed. When he is gone she jumps up and, still naked, prepares the trays. In the noiseless light she opens the croissants, diligent as a maid, spreads them evenly with butter, arranges them back on the plates. Her flesh shines. It draws him. He moves to stay near her, like a child, hoping she will smile at him, give him a taste. He feels like jumping around, making noise, she is so occupied, so serene. She opens the confiture. Put some here, he wants to say. Grab her around the waist. Dance. He kisses her elbow. She glances at him and smiles.

Place Stanislas on a still Sunday morning. Windows through which the silence of Nancy pours, borne by the